The Dining Room: Exploring the Design of Twelve Iconic Rooms in Search of the Perfect Dining Experience

Architect John Ota credits Frank Lloyd Wright with inspiring him to think about dining areas and dining furniture as having importance greater than sheer functionality. For the Robie family of Chicago, Wright designed chairs with unusually high backs, creating a room within a room at the dining table, a place for them to feel protection and togetherness.

Ota explores twelve dining rooms in six countries, from the childhood dining room of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Frida Kahlo’s Casa Azul to the nineteenth-centurey home of a Japanese samurai clan and an open-air dining room at a farm-to-table restaurant in the Ontario, Canada, countryside.

His essays remind us how strongly dining rooms reflect the cultures that build them, as well as the families that use them. Materials, and colors, decorum and menus, the situation of the dining room in relation to the rest of the house, and certainly who was welcome to share a meal there: all are part of the portraits Ota paints.

This is an engaging, jargon-free book, written with observant exuberance in place of insular analytical reserve. Ota’s drawings help us see the rooms in some of the ways he does, and understand how he experienced them.

Hardcover. Line drawings.